Adding Joy to Your Writing

Bard of the Bar

Aug 13

Brief writing is hard. Succeeding at something hard is assisted by having a sense of joy. I find joy in my love of great writing, and, occasionally, in stealing from the best. Now my idea of “the best” may be different from yours, but that’s okay. Whatever helps a writer is what matters. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare (though, for obvious reasons, that’s often one of my sources). I’ve used quotes from Yogi Berra, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Kurt Vonnegut, James Patterson, Star Trek, tennis matches, judges, sociologists, and a bunch of architects.

Whatever inspires YOU can make YOUR writing process more enjoyable, and an enjoyable process will make your appellate writing better. (I was going to say “inspired,” but “inspired legal writing” seems like an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp.”)

One piece of writing that has influenced this blog is the following poem by Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

To borrow from Emily, I hope my blog, unlike a frog, is adding something cheery to the fellow lawyers in our bog.